The need for business continuance and fast data recovery is acute and well known. In order to provide consistent and high performance customer support, businesses often deploy multiple data protection techniques to minimize system downtime and to ensure critical data is readily available for fast recovery. System downtime may be planned or unplanned. Many systems in existence today provide fault tolerant and/or high availability of systems to improve customer experience. For example, some systems today may include failover clustering in order to provide high availability during system downtime. A failover cluster may include a primary repository and at least one replica of the primary repository as secondary repository, which may provide certain degree of redundancy. In case of system plan or unplanned downtime, a secondary repository may seamless take over the role of the primary repository, and thereby continue serving customers without significant interruption.
In conjunction with failover clustering, other comprehensive replication techniques may be used to back up data and ensure backup data is readily available for fast recovery. Various replication techniques in existence today involve making copies of the data stored in a primary repository and then tracking changes to the data. For example, one backup technique may involve taking a full backup of the primary repository, followed by taking one or more partial backups, such as incremental or differential backups.
The challenge of using multiple data protection techniques is the seamless integration of various systems. For example, for data protection purpose, certain types of full backup may not be allowed to perform on replicas in a failover cluster. However, after a secondary repository takes over the role of the primary repository, performing full backups on the replica may be necessary. From a user's perspective, just like a system should provide seamless transition during a failover, a transparent and continuous backup should also be in place to ensure business continuation and fast recovery.
There is a need, therefore, for an improved method or system that provides seamless and transparent backup of failover clustering.